Weighed in an Even Balance

WEIGHED IN AN EVEN BALANCE WEIGHED IN AN EVEN BALANCE Michael A. Bellesiles Soft Skull Press Brooklyn, NY Copyright © 2003 Michael A. Bellesisles Book design by Sarah Groff-Palermo Soft Skull Press 71 Bond Street Brooklyn, NY 11217 www.softskull.com Let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know mine integrity. Job 31: 6 Contents One Context 1 Two Probate Records 5 Three Specific Challenges: Accurate 13 Four Specific Challenges: Perceived Errors 19 Five Specific Challenges: Matters of Interpretation 47 Conclusion 57 Notes 61 Chapter One Context In the sixteenth century, Oxford University had a statute that any of its students or professors “who did not follow Aristotle faithfully were liable to a fine of five shillings for every point of divergence.” —Graham Midgley1 n September 2000, a book appeared challenging the popular perception Ithat Americans have always been a heavily armed people. Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture questioned a series of assumptions about Americans’ relationship with guns by examining a wide array of evidence across three centuries. The book came under sustained assault nearly a year before its appearance. Along the way a number of accusations were made against the book’s scholarship and its author. Most of these accusations focus on the three paragraphs and one table dealing with probate records, though other charges emerged, primarily on the web. As the author of Arming America, I would rather not engage in the highly political and personal tone of these attacks which often say more about the critic than about the content of the book. As the goal of this tract is the fur- therance of scholarship, I prefer to simply answer each of the charges of falsification in turn. For that reason, each accusation is quoted without attribution, so as to avoid further personal- izing this debate. Not all critiques are equal. I hope that it is evident that many accusations made against Arming America have no relation to the text but are rather based on what some people assume or imagine the book says. A great many attacks appear to have been motivated by political agendas. Unfortunately, the polemical static obscured a number of legitimate criticisms, and I did not respond adequately to each and every allegation. This document is an effort to respond to every specific criticism of the book. Many criticisms of this book have either correctly identified errors or offered an alternative reading of the source. I welcome the former, which has led to the publication of an improved second edition. While there were errors in the first edition, none of them was made intentionally or with any design to mislead the reader. The latter form of critique, alternative interpretations, are important and helpful, forming the essence of scholarly debate. Hopefully these critiques will inspire further research, for, as Arming America attempted to make clear, America’s gun heritage is a sur- 2 Michael Bellesiles prisingly underexplored aspect of our history. As stated in the introduction to the book, I have only scratched the surface of the documentary record, and the vast amounts of material, such as military records, demand further exploration. There is certainly room for disagreement about the significance of the evidence provided by Arming America, but my goal in writing it was to present a rigorous and accurate historical account and a reasonable, though controver- sial, interpretation of the historical record. Not for a moment do I mean to suggest that Arming America is free of error; it is likely that no work of scholarship is free from error. The individual scholar thus has a responsibility to correct any mistakes in his or her work, as I have consistently endeavored to do. In his biog- raphy, Truman, David McCullough quotes a memo from General Thomas Handy of George Marshall’s staff as stating that the military expected 500,000 to one million casualties in the invasion of Japan.2 As it turned out, the memo was actually written by former President Her- bert Hoover and General Handy’s covering memo dismisses the prediction as ridiculous. The Army’s highest casualty figure for the invasion was 67,000. Though McCullough acknowl- edged the error, it has never been corrected in Truman, which is still available in bookstores. The failure to correct that mistake in print has had major consequences, as it is often quoted to justify America’s decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan and was repeatedly cited in the debate over the cancelled Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian.3 Even the finest scholars, and I place McCullough in that camp, make mistakes. However, acknowledging an error is not enough, it must be corrected. From the first appearance of Arming America, I have done my best to correct any errors, as I do here and in the revised edition of the book. Above all else, I hope that anyone attempting to evaluate Arming America will actually read the book. This may seem a self-evident request, and any author would like to have people read his or her book, but I believe that much of the criticism of Arming America is based on misinformation spread on the web. Arming America was the product of ten years of research in scores of archives.4 It exam- ines the development of America’s gun culture from the first European settlements through 1877. The book’s thesis is that the gun culture which is now so widely taken for granted in the United States has not always been a “given” of life in America, but developed during the mid- nineteenth century. An increase in the production of firearms under federal supervision in the 1850s set the groundwork for the slaughter of the Civil War. That war generated a massive increase in the demand for guns, while training millions of American men in the use of firearms. This is not a simple story, and Arming America is a rather complex book. I aimed to explore a broad diversity of experience over three centuries and to avoid sweeping generaliza- tions about what Americans believed as a collective, giving attention to regional, class, racial, and gender differences. Starting with the earliest use of firearms in Europe, paying particular attention to political and cultural trends in England, Arming America tracks firearms to North America. I attempt to show the gun’s range of uses and limitations in the daily life of colonial America, as well as the effort of colonial governments to acquire and preserve sufficient firearms for their defense. The fourth chapter, which several critics have suggested contains the most original contribution of the book, argues that the Eastern Woodlands Indians constituted America’s first gun culture. Moving from the attitudes of North America’s natives to wilderness war- Weighed in an Even Balance 3 fare, I follow the lead of many fine military historians in matching the myth and reality of the militia in the eighteenth century. The American Revolution serves as the practical test of these historical arguments, as the militia displayed occasional moments of astounding heroism and a steady pattern of avoidance. I do maintain that the militia’s hesitance to do battle was per- fectly rational, given the shortage of firearms and the general ignorance of their proper use. It is certainly the case that the military and political leaders of the patriot cause worked constantly to acquire sufficient firearms for their struggle with England. Since there were no gun manufactories in North America, they had no choice but to turn to Europe, finding willing suppliers in France and the Netherlands. Chapter 7 is the pivot of the book. In this and the two following chapters, I endeavor to show how the new federal government sought constantly to encourage arms production, pro- mote the better organization and arming of the militia, and develop a way of training a large number of men in the use of firearms while avoiding an expensive standing army. These efforts failed miserably, as the War of 1812 amply demonstrated. Meanwhile, state governments walked a fine line between the perceived need to supply arms to reliable citizens for internal defense and the desire to prevent those arms from falling into the hands of feared classes—Indians, blacks, the poor, and political radicals. I focus on a number of domestic political disputes in order to uncover the use of firearms and the level of violence. The cre- ation of a hunting subculture in the late 1820s and the erratic progress of uniformed militia companies point to a growing yet still limited interest in firearms. The book’s last chapter focuses on the significant improvements in firearms technology and production in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as the traumatic and decisive experience of the Civil War, to discover the origins of America’s gun culture. I like the way Carl Bogus has put it, that Arming America “explores the development of an American gun culture by following the hardware.” The book does attempt to focus on the guns, to find “how many there were, who made them, who had them, where they were kept, and how they were used.”5 This work offered a reading of America’s fascination with firearms that was clearly at variance with received tradition. This contrary thesis was presented in the spirit of exploration, with the hope that other historians would be interested enough to pursue the subject as well and engage with the findings of this author. Historians, like all scholars, formulate hypotheses to explain some aspect of the past, and then test them against what we can know or think we know.

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